It was September, 1975. My husband and I were in the middle of an argument—again. You see, we were born in the same year—10 days apart. The argument was about how we celebrated birthdays. For the first three years of our marriage, I had been seriously disappointed with how Alan celebrated my birthday. Birthdays were big in my family growing up—you got to pick what we had for supper, what kind of cake you wanted, and everybody was especially nice to you all day. Every year since we had known each other I had treated Alan with that deference in love—hoping he would remember the next year.
Not so. Not so again that year. This time, my somewhat fragile maturity fell apart, and I complained loudly with many tears.
It was then that dialogue enabled me to discover a very important fact I had not known. I had known that Alan’s family had been in a terrible accident when he was thirteen. His brother had died from the accident, his parents were in hospitals for weeks, and he had been left with strangers in a foreign country until his parents recovered. But I hadn’t known until that heated dialogue that the date of that accident was the same date as my birthday.
As soon as I learned that, it made total sense that Alan was emotionally distant and uncelebratory on my birthday. It was a day of trauma and grief for him. AND the solution to the birthday problem was also easy to see: we would celebrate our birthdays together always on the weekend between the two dates.
Our readings today have an overarching theme of our call to accept those who are “foreign” to us. For most of us most of the time, that is not easy to do. Within that general theme, the Gospel speaks of a way to make the journey toward acceptance easier: the power of dialogue conducted with faith to discover and express truth and love.
Isaiah 56:1, 6-7
This short selection from third Isaiah (the part of Isaiah written to guide the Hebrews after they returned to rebuild Israel) addressed a practical problem: how were the returning Hebrews to act with the people who now inhabited Canaan? In this passage YHWH says to “Observe what is right, do what is just” because salvation is “about to come” to MORE than the Hebrew people. YHWH is introducing his chosen people to the idea that THROUGH them God’s goodness will spread across the world. He was planning ahead! This is God’s advice some 500 years BEFORE Jesus.
Were all foreigners to be embraced? The returning Jews had just been subject to foreigners for 70 years. Those foreigners had torn down their city and their temple. The foreigners now in Jerusalem were Samaritans, Canaanites, and the poorer Jews who had been left in Canaan 70 years before who had intermarried with them.
In this passage God gives criteria for who to accept: “The foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, ministering to him, loving the name of the LORD, and becoming his servants.” If you read the story of the return in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, you see this guidance from YHWH was not easy to follow.
There was a need for dialogue, understanding, and solutions to problems that included the needs of both peoples.
Nonetheless, in Jesus’ day, there remained a high level of prejudice against the Gentiles who lived among them.
Matthew 15:21-28
To put today’s dialogue between Jesus and the Canaanite woman in time line context, this happens after Jesus fed the 5000 and before Peter’s confession of faith and the Transfiguration. Genessaret is fertile plain between the Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean. Jesus is walking through country-side teaching, dialoguing, and healing. You could say it is his last mission trip before the shadow of the cross begins to color what Jesus says and does.
In this context, a non-Jewish woman seeks Jesus out to heal her daughter. By today’s standards, Jesus and the disciples’ behavior does not seem good. Jesus calls the woman and her daughter “dogs.”
I have struggled with that for years. Today resolution comes for me through consideration of dialogue.
What is dialogue? In my therapy office I define it as “conversation in which people speak respectfully and listen carefully in order to come to mutual understanding.” I smile and say to every new couple who comes to me for counseling, “You can argue at home. It’s the same conversation again and again that gets you nowhere. In here you don’t argue. You dialogue. The difference in dialogue is that you respectfully speak truth as you see it, then you respectfully listen to the other person’s perspective. The goal is to get beneath the surface disagreement to a place of enough respect for each other that love, shared truth, and faith can return to the conversation.
Love and faith for a couple in therapy means being able to truly seek the good of the other, as well as self, and faith that goodness within both people can work things out. Truth is reality.
It doesn’t always happen, but it often does.
In Jesus’ dialogue with the woman today, it happens. Jesus dialogues with the woman and discovers her love (she crossed over lines of culture and prejudice to ask Jesus to help her—the motivation for that was her love for her daughter) as well as her faith—her belief that Jesus (God) can help her. In this process she is not intimidated. The truth came through her logic.
She said: “Even the dogs eat the scraps from the master’s table.” Jesus sees the truth in what she is saying. He is influenced because her faith and her respect for him (she had done him homage) showed her goodness.
Romans 11:13-15, 29-32
Paul, knew what God had said in Isaiah. Perhaps he knew the story in today’s Gospel, but he definitely knew his own struggle to see what Jesus saw in a couple of sentences: God seeks to save us all. “For God delivered all to disobedience that he might have mercy upon all.”
Applications: The Power of Faith, Truth, and Love in Dialogue
The picture today is a painting by a friend of mine from Stewart Home School. Faith it shouts in bold color by my kitchen table. What is faith? What is faith in dialogue? Regular readers will recognize the definition of faith from the catechism that I quote from time to time:
142 By his Revelation, “the invisible God, from the fullness of his love, addresses men as his friends, and moves among them, in order to invite and receive them into his own company.” The adequate response to this invitation is faith.
143 By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. With his whole being man gives his assent to God the revealer. Sacred Scripture calls this human response to God, the author of revelation, “the obedience of faith”.
144 To obey (from the Latin ob-audire, to “hear or listen to”) in faith is to submit freely to the word that has been heard, because its truth is guaranteed by God, who is Truth itself. Abraham is the model of such obedience offered us by Sacred Scripture. the Virgin Mary is its most perfect embodiment.
Such obedience of faith leads to love, to seeking the good of the other, as well as to truth because through obedience of faith we can and do become like God.
And God seeks the good of the other—including the Canaanite woman and her daughter, including all who are foreign to us, including us.
God’s seeking the good of the other by resolving the other’s pain is a chunk of the truth in every faith-filled dialogue.
Bernard Guerney, Jr., my mentor for many years, would frequently say, “There is nothing more powerful to create change than to hear a person’s pain spoken along with their love.”
Prayer:
Lord, sometimes I can be like you and think, “This person’s problems are outside my sphere of influence.” Today, help me be like you by being willing to dialogue with those whom I might see as “outside.” Then let me be influenced by what I hear. Also, let me be guided by remembering that faith in you includes obedience to both what you say and your way of being in the world: a way of dialoguing with faith, truth, AND love. This week help every encounter with others to be a faith-love-truth dialogue.
